avturchin

Surely, there are lager effect sizes there, but they need much more test­ing to prove the safety and such test­ing is the most ex­pen­sive part of any tri­als. There is a few already safe in­ter­ven­tion which could help to ex­tend life, that is, be­sides met­formin, green tee and vi­tamin D.

Even as a trillion dol­lar pro­ject, fight­ing ag­ing could be still cost-effec­tive, af­ter we di­vide the benefit for 10 billion peo­ple.

If we speak­ing on de novo ther­a­pies, cur­rent price of just one drug de­vel­op­ment is close to 10 billions, and com­pre­hen­sive ag­ing ther­apy like SENS should in­clude many new in­ter­ven­tions, so it may be rea­son­able to es­ti­mate that it will be equal to 100 new in­ter­ven­tions, and thus trillion dol­lar price is real. The sum is large but af­ford­able for hu­man­ity as whole: to­tal space fund­ing for all his­tory is around this price.

How­ever, it is im­pos­si­ble to get such trillion dol­lar fund­ing via dona­tions. But EA efforts could be used to at­tract larger fun­ders, like pen­sion funds, farma, gov­ern­ments, billion­aires and in­surance com­pa­nies for fund­ing such pro­jects as they will even­tu­ally benefit from the cure for ag­ing.

The main ques­tion as I see: is cur­rent spend­ing of 1 billion-a-year on ag­ing enough to de­lay ag­ing for 10 years? Aging is a prob­lem of (hy­per)ex­po­nen­tially in­creas­ing com­plex­ity with time. There are prob­a­bly a few in­ter­ven­tions which could give 1-3 years of ex­pected life ex­ten­sion (and ag­ing de­lay): met­formin, vi­tamin D and green tea, and proper test­ing of them could cost as few as tens mil­lions of dol­lars as in pro­posed TAME study of met­formin. This (+chance to sur­vive for other life ex­tend­ing tech­nolo­gies) means much higher cost-effec­tive­ness of such small ex­per­i­ments, as I de­scribed in the post. There are sev­eral other ways to donate more cost-effec­tively than di­rectly fund­ing ag­ing re­search, like lob­by­ing WHO that ag­ing is a dis­ease.

On the other hand, as ag­ing is so quickly grows in time, adding up with small in­ter­ven­tions will not give us 10 years de­lay of ag­ing. So when we speak about 10 years ag­ing de­lay, costs be­come much higher, as there is no more low-hang­ing fruits.

I read an opinion that cur­rent ag­ing re­search may benefit of 10 times in­crease in spend­ing. But it is still not clear, how much should be spent in this mode to find “a cure for ag­ing”. I gues­ti­mate that at least a trillion dol­lars for 10 ten years de­lay of ag­ing - above the level which we could get via sim­ple (but un­der­tested) in­ter­ven­tions, which is 3-5 years.

Now, spend­ing a trillion dol­lars will give 10 billion peo­ple 10 years QALY each, which is only 10 dol­lars for QALY (as­sum­ing that we should not count the price of ther­apy, as peo­ple will pay them­selves, and they only need an op­por­tu­nity for life ex­ten­sion, but not con­strained in health spend­ings).

In fact, I tried also to ex­plore this idea—which I find cru­cial—in my Rus­sian book “Struc­ture of global catas­tro­phe”, but my at­tempts to trans­late into English didn’t work well, so I now slowly con­vert its con­tent in the ar­ti­cles.

I would add an im­por­tant link on the A Sin­gu­lar Chain of Eventsby Tonn and MacGre­gor, as well as work of Seth Baum on dou­ble catas­tro­phes. The idea of “Peak ev­ery­thing” about si­mul­ta­neous de­ple­tion of all nat­u­ral re­sources also be­long here, but should be com­bined with idea of Sin­gu­lar­ity as idea of ac­cel­er­a­tion of ev­ery­thing, which com­bined cre­ate very un­sta­ble situ­a­tion.

I’ve read that US has an in­stru­ment to at­tack hard­ened un­der­ground fa­cil­ities by mul­ti­ple heavy nu­clear strike in one place, which al­lows cre­at­ing much deeper crate than a sin­gle nu­clear ex­plo­sion and de­stroy tar­gets around 1 km deep. The same way an vol­canic caldera cover could be at­tacked, and such mul­ti­ple strikes could weaken its strength un­til it blow up by in­ter­nal pres­sure—so you don’t need to go through the whole caldera’s cover. no new weapons for it is needed—just spe­cial tar­get­ing of already ex­it­ing.

“Nor­mal” nu­clear war could be only only a first stage of mul­ti­stage col­lapse. How­ever, there are some ideas, how to use ex­it­ing nu­clear stock­piles to cause more dam­age and trig­ger a larger global catas­tro­phe—one is most dis­cussed is nuk­ing a su­per­vol­cano, but there are oth­ers. In Rus­sian sources is a com­mon place that re­tal­i­a­tion at­tack on US may in­clude at­tack on the Yel­low­stone, but I don’t know if it is a part of the offi­cial doc­trine.

Fu­ture nu­clear war could be us­ing even more de­struc­tive weapons (which may ex­ist se­cretly now). Tel­ler has been work­ing on 10 gi­ga­ton bomb. Rus­si­ans now mak­ing Po­sei­don large tor­pedo sys­tem which will be prob­a­bly equipped with 100 Mt cobalt bombs.

“Nor­mal” global warm­ing is not x-risk, but pos­si­ble heavy tail con­nected with some­thing un­known could be. For ex­am­ple, the ob­served sta­bil­ity of our cli­mate may be just an “an­thropic shadow”, and, in fact, cli­mate tran­si­tion to the next hot­ter meta-sta­ble con­di­tion is long over­due, and could be trig­gered by small hu­man ac­tions.

The next meta-sta­ble state may be with me­dian tem­per­a­ture 57C ac­cord­ing to the ar­ti­cle https://​​www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/​​pmc/​​ar­ti­cles/​​PMC4748134/​​ (“The cli­mate in­sta­bil­ity is caused by a pos­i­tive cloud feed­back and leads to a new steady state with global-mean sea-sur­face tem­per­a­tures above 330 K”)

Be­cause of ris­ing so­lar lu­minos­ity the ex­tinc­tion level global warm­ing is a ques­tion of “when”, not “if”, but typ­i­cally it is es­ti­mated to hap­pen hun­dreds mil­lions years from now.

I would add to your ty­pol­ogy the s-risks of quan­tum im­mor­tal­ity—an in­finitely log timeline where a per­son is not dy­ing from ag­ing. Ac­tu­ally, I con­cluded now that such timeline will even­tu­ally end up in some form of AI re­s­ur­rec­tion, but such AI may be hos­tile.

Another type which should be men­tioned is “hos­tile hu­man aug­men­ta­tion”, where neu­rons are rewired by hos­tile AI to make the vic­tim feel even stronger and stronger pain. Which end up in tiling uni­verse with anti-or­gas­ma­tro­n­ium.

Another dis­tinc­tion which should be men­tioned is be­tween a pure “pain s-risks” and s-risks where a per­son also have moral suffer­ings via un­der­stand­ing of her bad—and prob­a­bly eter­nally wors­en­ing—situ­a­tion (as in the story “I have no mouth but I must scream”).

Smaller or­gani­sa­tion also prob­a­bly have to pay larger rel­a­tive cost for failed grants’ at­tempts. Their main tal­ents have to spend sig­nifi­cant amount of time on writ­ing grant pro­pos­als (or write shorter pro­pos­als of lower qual­ity).

One point is that in our time life ex­ten­sion is more im­por­tant than QALY, be­cause life ex­ten­sion in­creases the chances of a per­son to sur­vive un­til po­ten­tial in­definite life ex­ten­sion (or some other im­por­tant sci­en­tific break­throughs with sig­nifi­cant value).

One more way to treat burnout is to com­pletely change the pro­fes­sion or main type of ac­tivity. I did it a few times. I find that af­ter around 10 years I have enough in­ter­est to re­turn to abounded field.

Such de­ci­sions are costly and may not help to have great suc­cess in life, as some most suc­cess­ful peo­ple were able to con­cen­trate on one-two pro­jects for much longer than oth­ers. But also some peo­ple are suc­cess­ful ex­actly be­cause they are work­ing in differ­ent pro­jects (e.g. Musk).